The Scam
There was a store in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that was running a points-for-cash scheme. People would give the owner of the store their credit cards, he would rack up charges on the cards and then pay off the balance. He benefitted from a what amounted to a cash advance while the cardholders accrued credit card points they didn’t actually have to pay for.
As could be expected, eventually the store owner stopped paying the bills and the credit card holders were left with millions of dollars in debt between them. They hired Zaki Tamir to help them. Since most if not all of the of the victims of this scam were members of the Crown Heights Jewish community where Zaki lives, they believed that Zaki had their best interest in mind and would help them both as victims and fellow community members. Zaki ended up representing a group of 53 individuals. They didn’t realize they would be made victims once again!
The Lawsuit
How do you recoup money that’s stolen and all spent? You can’t sue the thief - even if you win you won’t get any of your money back! Zaki convinced them that they had a chance of recouping their money by suing the financial institutions that enabled the money to trade hands. To help with the case he brought on Mitchell Shapiro who had, according to his website, served as co-lead counsel in a case which resulted in a $3B settlement against Visa and Mastercard. Zaki convinced the plaintiffs that given Mr. Shapiro’s history fighting big banks, they had a good chance of recouping their money.
These plaintiffs were so desperate they were willing to pay the large retainers required to hire the likes of Zaki Tamir and Mitchell Shapiro. But the case was doomed to fail from the start; the only ones to profit were the lawyers! It doesn’t take a legal genius to understand how flawed the underlying arguments were and, sure enough, the case did not go well for the plaintiffs. In fact, the judge had some interesting things to say about the case and when rendering the decision he went so far as to state
I am flabbergasted by the relief that is being asked before me
References
A list of court documents from that case can be found on the NY court system website. The transcript from the case contains some really great quotes from both opposing counsel as well as the judge. It’s available in PDF format direct from the NY court system. I’ve also uploaded an HTML version (worse formatting but easier to copy/paste).